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On this week’s episode of MasterChef Canada, the role of ringmaster is being played by the “Demon Chef” himself, Alvin Leung.

Eyes blazing behind his trademark blue-tinted glasses, he cracks a metaphorical whip as he snarls ironically at his charges, advising them that, “A peaceful kitchen is an efficient kitchen.”

The popular CTV show (airing Sunday nights at 7 p.m.) has 14 contestants left and this week they have to prepare a meal for the cast of Kurios — Cabinet of Curiosities, the hit Cirque du Soleil show that played in Toronto last summer.

The international feel of Cirque provides an appropriate setting in which to meet Leung, a man who was born in London, spent his early childhood in Hong Kong and grew up in Scarborough.

“I left London when I was 2 months old and Hong Kong when I was 5 years old, so I did most of my growing up right here,” he says.

Since then, he’s become a giant of the food world, known for his “X-Treme Chinese cuisine” at his restaurants Bo Innovation (Hong Kong) and Bo London, both of which have earned coveted Michelin stars.

This April, he’ll open his latest spot, R&D Restaurant at 241 Spadina Ave., which he’s creating in partnership with Eric Chong, the Season 1 champion on MasterChef Canada.

“I met him and liked him and said, ‘Why don’t you train under me for a couple of months and then let’s do a restaurant together?’ It’s going to open soon and I love working with a bunch of Canadians again.”

Although Leung loves his adopted country, he’s not wide-eyed about his experience growing up here in the 1960s. (He’s 53 now.)

“Language is the first thing I remember as a problem. To be able to learn how to communicate was very hard for a kid from Hong Kong. I figured out how to do it in about a year, but that was one tough year, believe me.

“I honestly think back then we were the first Chinese on the block in Scarborough. If you go back now, it’s probably all Chinese, but we were the trailblazers.”

Leung also admits that Canada’s current image as the friend of multiculturalism wasn’t exactly what greeted him and his family back then.

“It was tough. There was a lot of discrimination. People’s views weren’t as free as they are now. The government of Canada has done a great job since then, seriously, but it wasn’t that good back then.

“What happened? Fights, insults, keeping me and my family out of things. They’re not so bad to little kids, but when you get higher and higher in school it gets tougher and tougher.”

It wasn’t long before Leung developed the street-smart persona he still carries today.

“By the time I was in high school, I was big enough to beat the hell out of everybody who said anything to me. And I learned how to blend in.

“All of that made me a very confident man. A very aggressive man. I developed it to survive. That could have given some people an inferiority complex, but it worked the opposite way on me.” He chuckles sardonically. “No one has ever thought I had an inferiority complex.”

With all of this going on in his life, you might think Leung would have been tempted to go astray, but there was another element shaping his destiny.

“My mom wasn’t a good cook. No, that was an understatement. She was really horrible. And in a Chinese family, that’s a disaster. It was also hard for us to adjust right away to Canadian food from the 1960s, macaroni and cheese and whatnot.

“So I started cooking and I became innovative. Trying to fit some of the flavours and textures of the new food from here with the old food from home. I got chances I would never have had if I had stayed home in Hong Kong.

“I learned to do hamburgers, spaghetti, tomato sauce. But even at the start I had to add a touch of my own. I remember putting curry powder in tomato sauce and saying, ‘That’s different! I like that!’”

At the age of 16, he entered the restaurant business as “a bus boy at a Chinese restaurant in Scarborough” and then promptly left.

That was it. No slowly climbing up the foodie ladder one step at a time, learning the trade from the inside.

For 20 years, in fact, he worked as an engineer, but he was a self-taught cook with a monumental sense of panache.

“I did a lot of dinner parties at home and cooked extravagantly. I even had a chef’s uniform with my name embroidered on it. Pretentious, yes, but impressive. I always dreamed of being a great chef.”

And then, opportunity knocked. “Ten years ago, a friend of mine had a place that wasn’t doing too well.” In fact, it was a near bankrupt speakeasy called Bo Inosaki.

He rechristened it Bo Innovation, invented dishes like “Sex on the Beach” (featuring an edible condom filled with honey and ham) and had earned three Michelin stars by 2014.

Next came Bo London, which also got the Michelin star of approval, and Leung became famous through various TV shows thanks to his vivid personality.

“I had some success early on. And I got more and more successful. Am I now invincible? Should I stop now? But only the good die young and I’m not all that young.” His laugh is enormous.

“In the short 10 years I’ve been doing this, I’m a lot wiser. I now control the amount of creativity I put in that people will accept. Success can be good, but failure can be better.”

Asked if he can recall his most spectacular kitchen failure, he shrugs the concept off irritably.

“I’m triple type A, ADHD, all of it. I have so many ideas. I don’t spend a week on one recipe. You learn from a mistake by just not doing it ever again. And then you forget about it.

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